Cain Marko//Juggernaut (massivemomentum) wrote in marvel_united, @ 2009-11-10 18:50:00 |
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Entry tags: | juggernaut, rogue |
Who: Juggernaut and Rogue
NPCs: None?
When: Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
Where: Xavier's Academy, Westchester Co., NY
What: Arriving for his pow-wow with Charles, Cain finds out that Marie apparently missed the "white flag" memo
Rating: PG-13
Cain could have teleported there right before he was supposed to show up, but it wasn't like he was going to sleep well beforehand anyhow. So the long drive on his bike up from Charlotte through the night was a welcome distraction. He wasn't going to get lost on the way and not find the place: he'd lived several years of his life here, after all. At least Charlie had done something good with the place. If there were kids for whom it was a sanctuary rather than the living hell it had been for a young Cain, good for them. For his part, he still wished the place had burned to the ground all those years ago rather than just Kurt Marko's laboratory in the outbuilding.
Towns passed by on the road in the cool night air, barely noticed, as his mind turned the matter over and over. He hadn't been back to the mansion in over twenty years, not since he'd come gunning for Charlie's blood right after he finally dug his way free in Korea. He hadn't known it was a school then--a guy missed a lot being trapped for twenty years--but he could acknowledge, if only to himself, that even that fact wouldn't have stopped him, not back then. He'd been too driven by nothing but his own unstoppable animal fury, to the point where when Xavier had tried to call him by name and reason with him, he'd snarled back that Cain Marko had died that day under the mountain and all that remained was the Juggernaut. It had still been a while after that fight that he started to regain some sense of self.
Well, that was just one more happy, fuzzy memory of times on Graymalkin Lane. He had quite a shelf of trophies there to dust off, didn't he: a fine, glittering assortment of assorted failures and nightmares and shame.
And now he was headed back to the mansion to add a real whopper to that unhappy collection. This one would be the best yet.
For the first time, he wondered what purpose his old bedroom had now at Xavier's school. He sort of hoped some kid wasn't living there; to subject a student to the lingering bad mojo of all the painful memories that room had witnessed when he was a teenager himself seemed cruel.
He'd known when he picked up the phone Tuesday morning and called Xavier's that it could only end with him suffering some kind of humiliation far beyond that of having to ask for help, painful as that act was to start. Charlie wasn't going to do this as a simple family favor for the stepbrother he'd left to die. Moreover, Cain sure as hell wouldn't ask it as one. He never wanted to feel indebted to Charles Xavier, because as he was proving right now, he always paid what he felt he owed.
He knew plenty about Charlie's mental powers--too much for comfort--and the rumor from Magneto was that Xavier had some device that allowed him to use his powers to locate and track the brainwaves of any mutant. Fortunately for his peace of mind, Cain wasn't a mutant. Cain had asked, Charlie had admitted it, and then it was simply down to the matter of their discussing price for Xavier to locate Tom. He'd already suspected what it would cost him for the information; the white hats were pretty obvious. And he knew he was willing to pay it. So yes, for the man he considered his true brother, he was willing to pay through the nose to the man who was his brother by a simple legal technicality. But of course the manipulative bastard had taken advantage of how desperate Cain was to throw another brick on the pile. He knew Cain could hardly say no, even as he made some bullshit murmurs of it somehow being for Cain's own good.
He'd feel the bite of the bargain soon enough, and he'd pay the toll a long while yet. But at least Tom, hopefully, would be safe. Parking the bike right outside the gate and stuffing his gloves in his pocket, he glanced towards the mansion. Noticing the American flag fluttering quietly at half-staff, he realized the date. It was Veteran's Day today and he smiled wryly to himself at the irony. Things with him and Charlie always came back either to the war or their time in this house, didn't they?
The kids should be in classes at this time of day, so they'd agreed to not make it a big production. Charlie would have called off his mutant attack dogs, and Cain intended on walking in there in normal form, no armor, as his own gesture of good faith. (He figured if they screwed him over, he could always turn the power on in a hurry. And if he'd managed a fight against Deadpool on baseline levels, he could manage to hold them off long enough here.)
He would have bet they'd seen him coming on camera already, though they were probably looking for him to appear as Juggernaut. Pushing the button of the intercom beside the gate, he announced, "It's Marko. I'm here to see Xavier."